Preparing Students for Jobs with a Liberal-Arts Plus Approach: A Review of Career-Ready Education (2019)

A version of this article originally appeared in October 2019 at my site makingalife.online, which is no longer published. It provides a review and critique of?The Chronicle of Higher Education’s?Career-Ready Education,?which itself compiles innovative approaches to reforming curricula and collaborating with employers and outside organizations.

The compact between higher education and American business is broken, or at least severely strained. According to Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein in their 2018 book?Our Higher Calling, universities have long held a partnership with the American public, central to which is the implicit promise that “a college degree will lead to a good job and secure financial future.”[1]

Today, the partnership is in doubt. As tuition and debt steadily climb, studies have suggested college graduates are not ready for the workplace. Thorp and Goldstein cite a startling statistic that gets to the root of the problem—the skills gap: “Whereas 96 percent of chief academic officers think that the graduates of their institution are properly equipped for employment out of college, only 11 percent of business leaders agree.”[2]?Americans have challenged colleges as never before, asking simply, “Will a college education lead to a good job and a good life? Even if it will, is it worth taking on high levels of debt to pay for it?”[3]

Over the past several years, a number of recent reports have tackled the question of how colleges can prepare students. The?Chronicle of Higher Education’s?2019 report?Career-Ready Education?offers a particularly useful consolidation of the pre-pandemic conversation, with its author Goldie Blumenstyk serving as a reliable guide as a veteran writer on higher education at the?Chronicle?and author of the best-selling 2015 book?American Higher Education in Crisis?

Her report quickly moves past the controversial question whether a skills-gap exists to address a more settled, if thorny issue: how to prepare students for today’s work experience. With the breakdown of job security and the rise of technology, automation, and the gig economy, employees have “longer, more turbulent work lives” through which they must “navigate … more or less on their own.” At the same time, colleges have seen the rise of competition from providers who offer alternatives to college degrees, like “certificates, badges, industry certifications, apprenticeships, even online games and challenges.” The short of it all is that “colleges have to prove their value to traditional-age students as well as to learners of any age looking for a change or a leg up.”[4]

Blumenstyk recognizes that colleges have a unique mission of their own and “highlights how colleges can meet the changing demands of the economy without being overreactive or reductive.” In so doing,?she focuses on three main challenges: making sense of the current labor market; creating and sustaining innovative curricula; and collaborating with employers and external partners effectively.[5]

What Blumenstyk writes about preparing students for the pre-pandemic job market in 2019 is still relevant today. As the marketplace rapidly changes, colleges face an information gap about “which fields are growing, what skills those fields require, or even what the jobs they are likely to get will pay.” The information gap is largely a matter of colleges and employers speaking past each other. In Blumenstyk’s words, “Employers are starting to ask what applicants can do, not what their degrees are in. It’s as if colleges and employers are speaking different languages.” A “Rosetta Stone” for skills and knowledge is necessary to translate the value of the degree to the employer.[6]

How dire is the situation, and what can colleges do? Blumenstyk avoids the pitfalls of apocalyptic predictions and notes that “the degree remains a reliable signal {to employers} for now,” but to remain relevant, “colleges {must}?rethink … what their degrees mean” to prepare students for the workplace.?In the second and third sections of the report, she reviews how colleges can update their programs and highlights specific models for work-based learning.?

Most relevant to liberal education, she reviews an approach she calls “liberal-arts plus.”?In this approach, traditional programs like philosophy or communication provide essential skills and knowledge for the workplace, but they also combine with “specific courses, or even mini-courses, that teach hard skills like coding, design, or data analytics. … to cultivate the versatility and ingenuity that will help graduates navigate the world of work in a more automated future.”

Other innovative approaches include requiring internships and/or micro-internships; providing apprenticeships; integrating industry courses and credentials into degree programs; and establishing mentorships.?For mentorships, colleges should look to public-private ventures with third-party organizations like Braven, Fullbridge or Koru to help students to build social capital, especially those who are low-income and first-generation students. Such efforts must not simply be add-ons; faculty must be engaged. She admits doing so may require extra attention, but in light of “the high value of faculty mentors in people’s career and life outcomes,” she encourages “even small investments toward greater engagement—and nudges from deans or department chairs in that direction.”[7]

Collaborating with employers is essential.?She begins with the obvious but difficult point: don’t assume what employers need. Ask. To understand the other side, both must develop a common language of skills and knowledge. Moreover, employers need to understand college norms and structures, especially related to accreditation and academic integrity, while colleges need to understand employers’ needs to protect proprietary information and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Parties also must know the roles they play, including who implements and who consults, and each must devote sufficient and reasonable time and money to the process. Throughout the process, third party organizations Blumenstyk identifies can guide and mediate discussions.[8]?Her work provides an excellent starting point for examining how higher education of all types—including liberal education—can innovate in career preparation without abandoning their institutional missions. It also provides numerous examples of institutions, employers, and educational companies who are ahead of the curve in their innovations.

Despite its admirable scope,?Career-Ready Education?raises two issues that need more attention: first is how to advise academically and professionally undecided students.?Blumenstyk aptly observes that “guidance—if students get it—doesn’t always clue them in to which fields are growing, what skills those fields require, or even what the jobs they are likely to get will pay.”[9]?While such information is helpful for students refining their choices, it is far less helpful for academically and professionally undecided liberal arts students, who are still discovering their own interests, strengths, and values as well as the wide variety of available roles and industries.

Career-Ready Education?doesn’t explicitly address how to advise undecided students, but it offers some points that can shed light on the matter. Blumenstyk notes that communication about work-skills must be stronger. From the start, advisors and faculty can emphasize that liberal arts majors provide essential workplace skills, and that as students discover careers of interest, they can complement their studies with job-specific training and education.

A second, more strategic, question is how much a liberal arts college should take responsibility for providing workplace skills, even in collaboration with employers.?Certainly, the incentives for a college to provide everything a student needs for work are powerful: today’s students crave clear pathways; high tuition rates imply promise of economic return; and employers still value the degree as a signal of career readiness. Most colleges can do more to clarify how to move from degree to career, how to translate skills and knowledge from degree to career, and how to supplement a degree with hard skills. Indeed, career-relevance is, in Blumenstyk’s words, “a powerful strand of American higher education’s DNA ever since forward-thinking Puritan ministers founded Harvard in 1636.”[10]

But admitting relevance is not the same as owning the problem.?Career-Ready Education?begs the questions of how far a college should go in providing opportunities. The report would benefit from deeper treatment of real concerns over how some types of changes not only create headaches, but pose genuine threats to institutional integrity. Blumenstyk admits that the process can have “some challenges and pitfalls” leading to “some speed bumps,” such as persuading reluctant faculty and overcoming “concerns about quality.”[11]?Some challenges are worth the trouble, such as developing experiential learning opportunities, which demand intensive work but are widely recognized as valuable by both liberal arts institutions and employers.[12]

But some changes, like incorporating employer designed-and-led programs into its curricula, introduce a whole new level of issues.?Career-Ready Education?treats embedding work programs into the curriculum as simply “pursu[ing] deeper affiliations,”[13]?but such a move fundamentally changes the relationship between the college and employer and can create problems for the college—a point Blumenstyk identifies elsewhere but leaves out of this report.

In essays in the?Chronicle of Higher Education?posted before the publication of?Career-Ready Education, Blumenstyk writes that embedding for-profit companies in higher education “portends a fundamental change” that can prompt a number of concerns. Those problems include potential challenges to faculty governance and autonomy;[14]?potential loss of control over operations; misalignment of the institutional and company missions; and “damage to … reputations and brands.”[15]

Certainly, a liberal arts institution can integrate employer programs into their curricula, but such a move is not simply a next step on the road of collaboration, so much as the first step of a fundamentally new venture, and it requires more caution than?Career-Ready Education?gives it.

In short, liberal arts colleges can take a number of steps to improve their workplace relevance, such as developing their advising of undecided students; fostering essential career skills and knowledge through experiential education; deepening partnerships with employers; and helping students identify opportunities for workplace readiness in and beyond college. With appropriate cautions, liberal arts colleges can innovate to contribute to career outcomes while reaffirming its unique place in the landscape of higher education.

[1]?Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein.?Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership between America and Its Colleges and Universities?(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 119.

[2]?Ibid., 121.

[3]?Ibid., 18.

[4]?Goldie Blumenstyk,?Career-Ready Education: Beyond the skills gap, tools and tactics for an evolving economy?(Washinton, D.C.: Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 2019), 6.

[5]?Ibid., 9-10.

[6]?Ibid., 14, 20, 16.

[7]?Ibid., 22-41.

[8]?Ibid., 23-35.

[9]?Ibid., 14.

[10]?Ibid., 23.

[11]?Ibid., 28, 26, 31.

[12]?For example, the American Association of Colleges and Universities–“a voice and a force for liberal education”– identifies internships and applied learning experiences as a high-impact practice benefiting students academically and professionally. See “High-Impact Educational Practices,”?American Association of Colleges and Universities, accessed October 27, 2019,https://www.aacu.org/leap/hips.

[13]?Blumenstyk,?Career-Ready Education,” 41.

[14]?Goldie Blumenstyk, “How For-Profit Education is Now Embedded in Traditional Colleges,”?Chronicle of Higher Education, January 4, 2016,?https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-For-Profit-Education-Is/234550.

How For Profit

[15]?Goldie Blumenstyk, College Leaders Are Getting Serious about Outsourcing. They Still Have Plenty of Concerns, Too.?Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2019,?https://www.chronicle.com/article/College-Leaders-Are-Getting/245978.

[16]?Blumenstyk,?Career-Ready Education, 42.